In Case the Wheels Come off the Patreon Bus...

[lb_lee]

Okay, so the latest thing where Patreon dropped payments and subscribers (thankfully doesn't seem to have affected me) has made us remember to discuss our plan in case Patreon goes down. No website is forever, all good rats have a way off the ship, and one of the nice things about the kind of work we do is, we know that a lot of you are fans of US, regardless of the platform we're on, and will follow us to wherever we are as long as it's not too inconvenient.

(This has also been percolating in the back of our head for years, because there are some parts of Patreon's interface that we deeply dislike. Finding old stuff again is hard! Once you name a tag, you're stuck with it forever. Etc.)

Should we need to leave Patreon, we'll be taking another small hop of faith. Instead of getting money through Patreon, we would be switching completely to LiberaPay, and we would be posting all the Patreon stuff (except doodle postcards) for free, either to healthymultiplicity.com or Dreamwidth. We would also make it RSSable and/or use a mailing list so folks could easily keep up with it.

We have been quietly using LiberaPay for years, and it's never given us a problem. Its whole "ART FOR THE COMMONS!" thing is very much in line with our own. For the past four years, it has been a boring, boring place, which is EXACTLY what you want your payment processor to be.

We've also been using hm.com and DW for years. DW's image hosting isn't great, but its accessibility and built-in RSS is, so are its tagging and finding-again functions, and we already have a paid account and are happy to continue paying them our cash. Their philosophy also jives with our own. We could also alt-text everything and make it easier to access for people with screen-readers, weird browsers, and so on.

So that's our plan. If you have input or thoughts, please let us hear them!